Qasem Soleimani

Qasem Soleimani (11 March 1957-) was a Major-General of Iran's IRGC paramilitary forces and commander of Quds Force since 1998. Soleiman was therefore the leader of Iran's covert operations in other countries, and he was involved in providing assistance to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine (until 2011), the Special Groups and Popular Mobilizaton Forces in Iraq, and the Syrian Arab Republic government of Syria.

Biography
Qasem Soleimani was born on 11 March 1957 in Rabor, Kerman Province, Iran to an impoverished peasant family, and he worked as a contractor for the Kerman Water Organization. Soleimani attended sermons from one of Ayatollah Khomeini's proteges during the 1970s, and he joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in 1979 during the Iranian Revolution. Soleimani personally assembled a company of men from Kerman during the Iran-Iraq War, and he rose through the ranks due to numerous tales of his bravery, and the Ramadan Headquarters sent Soleimani on raids deep into Ba'athist Iraq during the war.

Soleimani established contacts with both the Kurdish leadership of Iraqi Kurdistan and the Shia Badr Organization and other Shia militant organizations, and he served as IRGC commander in Kerman Province in the 1990s. In this post, he fought against drug trafficking into Afghanistan, and in 1998 he became the commander of the Quds Force special forces unit. A year later, he threatened a coup against the government of Mohammad Khatami if he did not crush the student rebellion, saying that the military would crush the protests and then overthrow the government if Khatami did not put down the Tehran student revolt. From 2001 to 2002 he worked alongside the United States in fighting the anti-Shia Taliban in Afghanistan, but the March 2002 "Axis of Evil" speech against Iran by the US president George W. Bush ended any chance of cooperation.

On 24 January 2011, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei promoted Qasem Soleimani to Major-General, and Khamenei helped him out financially and called him "a living martyr" due to his devoted service to Iran. In the second half of 2012, Suleimani took control of Iran's assistance of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad during the Syrian Civil War, and he dispatched as many as 5,000 Iranian troops to assist the Syrian Arab Army against the Syrian Opposition and Islamic State. In May 2013, he helped in the capture of Qusayr in Homs Governorate, orchestrating its recapture. He also assisted in the creation of the National Defense Forces pro-government militias, and Soleimani was on the ground in Syria directing operations. He would also assist the government of Iraq and the Shi'ite militias there in the fight against the Islamic State and other Sunni insurgents, and Soleimani had a hand in many government victories.